Connect SnapFind to Home Assistant

Home Assistant knows an enormous amount about your house. Which lights are on, which door is unlocked, how much power the dryer is pulling, whether anyone is home.

It knows nothing about your stuff. The physical objects — the socket set, the Christmas lights, the spare furnace filter, the box of cables — are invisible to it. No integration reports them, because they are not electrical. They just sit in bins.

SnapFind is the inventory of those bins. And since SnapFind runs an MCP server, and Home Assistant ships an MCP client, the two connect directly. No custom component. No HACS repository. No add-on to maintain.

The result: you ask your house where something is, out loud, and it tells you which bin.

Be clear about what you get

This is a conversation connection, not an entity connection. That distinction decides whether this is worth your afternoon, so here it is up front.

You get: your inventory as a set of tools your Assist conversation agent can call. Ask "where is the tile saw" from any voice satellite, wall tablet, or the Assist box in the sidebar, and it searches SnapFind and answers. It can browse containers, list what is checked out, count things, and read item details.

You do not get: entities. There is no sensor.snapfind_items_total to graph, no state to trigger an automation from, and no dashboard card. Home Assistant's MCP client hands tools to conversation agents, and that is the whole surface. If you were hoping to automate "notify me when a tool has been lent out for a week," that is not this, at least not yet.

One more thing worth saying to this audience: none of this is local. SnapFind is a cloud service, and the conversation agent you pair it with is probably cloud too. The lookups leave your house. If local-only is a rule you do not break, stop here — no hard feelings.

What you need

• Home Assistant 2026.4.3 or newer. The MCP client originally spoke only SSE. The SnapFind server is streamable HTTP, and newer Home Assistant tries streamable HTTP first and falls back. On an older version the connection simply will not establish.
• A SnapFind Teams account, and you are the owner. The connector is a Teams feature. Collaborators cannot connect their own assistant.
• A conversation agent that can call tools. The stock Assist intent engine does not use MCP tools. You need an LLM-backed agent — Google Generative AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, or a local model served through Ollama that handles tool calling.
• A terminal, once. One curl command, explained below.

Directions

1. Register Home Assistant as a client

Most AI apps register themselves with SnapFind automatically. Home Assistant does not — it expects you to bring an OAuth client ID and secret, the same way you would for a Google or Spotify integration. So you create one by hand. It takes one command.

Run this, replacing homeassistant.local:8123 with your own Home Assistant address:

curl -X POST https://www.snapfind.app/register \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "client_name": "Home Assistant",
    "redirect_uris": [
      "https://my.home-assistant.io/redirect/oauth",
      "http://homeassistant.local:8123/auth/external/callback"
    ],
    "grant_types": ["authorization_code", "refresh_token"],
    "response_types": ["code"],
    "token_endpoint_auth_method": "client_secret_post",
    "scope": "inventory:read"
  }'

Both redirect URLs are in there on purpose. Home Assistant uses the my.home-assistant.io one when the My Home Assistant integration is enabled, which it is on most installs, and the local address otherwise. Registering both means you do not have to know which case you are in.

You get JSON back containing client_id and client_secret. Copy them somewhere for the next step. The secret does not expire.

2. Add the credentials to Home Assistant

In Home Assistant:

1. Go to Settings → Devices & services.
2. Open the three-dot menu at the top right and choose Application credentials.
3. Select Add credential.
4. Pick Model Context Protocol as the integration.
5. Paste the client_id and client_secret from step 1. Name it "SnapFind" so you recognize it later.

3. Add the integration

1. Still in Settings → Devices & services, select Add integration at the bottom right.
2. Search for Model Context Protocol and select it.
3. Enter the server URL:

https://www.snapfind.app/mcp

4. Home Assistant sends you to SnapFind to sign in. Approve read access on the consent screen.
5. You land back in Home Assistant with the integration set up.

Behind the scenes, Home Assistant got a scoped read-only token. It refreshes on its own, so this is a one-time step.

4. Give the tools to your assistant

The tools exist now, but your voice assistant will not use them until you point an LLM agent at them.

1. Go to Settings → Voice assistants.
2. Open the assistant you use, or create one.
3. Set Conversation agent to your LLM integration — not the default Assist engine, which cannot call tools.
4. Save, then ask it something.

That is the step people miss. If the assistant answers "I am not aware of any item called a tile saw," the agent is almost always still set to stock Assist.

What to ask it

Where is the socket set?

What is in the bin labeled AYC82?

Is anything checked out right now, and who has it?

Do I already own a 10mm socket, or should I buy one?

What is in the garage that I have not photographed yet?

The last one is the sleeper. It runs an inventory hygiene audit and reads you the gaps, which is a genuinely annoying thing to do by hand and a strange delight to hear out loud from a speaker.

The best moment for this is standing in the garage with both hands full. That is the exact situation where pulling out a phone and typing is the thing you will not do, and where asking the room out loud costs nothing.

What it cannot do

The token is read-only, and there is no write scope to grant. Home Assistant can search, browse, read, count, and look at item photos you ask about. It cannot add an item, edit one, move one, check something out, or delete anything. Every change still happens in the SnapFind app, where a person taps the button.

That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. An inventory that a voice command can quietly rewrite is an inventory you stop trusting.

You can see the connection and end it any time from your Connected apps page. Deleting the integration in Home Assistant works too. Either one cuts access immediately.

When it does not work

"Model Context Protocol" is not in the integration list. Your Home Assistant is too old, or the integration was never loaded. Update to 2026.4.3 or newer.

The sign-in page rejects the redirect. The redirect URL Home Assistant used was not one you registered. Re-run step 1 with the other address, then update the application credential.

It connects, but the assistant ignores your inventory. The conversation agent is still the stock Assist engine. See step 4.

It says the connector needs Teams. The connector checks your plan on every request, so a Pro account or a lapsed subscription is refused even if the integration set up cleanly. Upgrade in the SnapFind app under Settings.

Answers are slow. Every question is a round trip to a cloud LLM and then to SnapFind. A few seconds is normal, and a local model on modest hardware will be slower than that.

Frequently asked questions

Does SnapFind have a Home Assistant integration?

There is no SnapFind custom component to install. SnapFind runs an MCP server, and Home Assistant ships an MCP client integration, so the two connect through an open standard with no add-on and no HACS repository.

What can Home Assistant do with my inventory?

It can answer questions through Assist. Ask where an item is, what is in a container, or what is checked out, and your voice assistant reads the answer from SnapFind. It is read-only, so it cannot change your inventory.

Does this create sensors or entities I can put on a dashboard?

No. The MCP integration gives tools to your conversation agent, not entities. There is no item-count sensor and no automation trigger. It is a question-and-answer connection.

Which Home Assistant version do I need?

Home Assistant 2026.4.3 or newer. Earlier versions of the MCP client only spoke SSE, and the SnapFind server uses streamable HTTP.

Do I need a paid SnapFind plan?

Yes. The MCP connector is a SnapFind Teams feature and only the account owner can connect it. Collaborators on a shared space cannot connect their own assistant yet.

Does this work offline or stay local?

No. SnapFind is a cloud service, so the lookups leave your house, and the conversation agent you pair with it may be cloud-based too. If a fully local stack is a hard requirement for you, this is not that.

Already run Home Assistant? Set up the connector, then go stand in the garage and ask it something.